Today's Tuesday - that means we had our normal weekly maintenance outage, and we're recovering from that now. Outside of the normal database compression, backup, and log rotation type tasks we also took care of the following:

1. Replaced the faulty drive on thumper (the primary science database server). This system is on Sun Service so such hardware failures are trivial. A drive fails, we call Sun, they send us a new drive right away, we plop it in, we send back the old drive, done. However there are still nagging problems on thumper at the OS/database level that still require our attention (a corrupt row in the Astropulse signal database and that funky root/RAID configuration that can only be fixed during a clean OS install).

2. Upgraded mysql on both the master and replica servers (mork and jocelyn) to version 5.1.37. This was finally made available in the Fedora distros and from what I've been told may fix those unload/reload formatting bugs. While we were at it, we yum'ed up pretty much everything.

3. Rebooted mork and ptolemy to pick up crash-dump parameters for the kernels. We were going to install debug versions of the kernels but Jeff was having odd results with that while testing one on his desktop, so we're holding off for now. Rebooted jocelyn to pick up a new kernel as well.

That's about it for the outage. Recovery will continue for a while. I'm rebuilding the replica mysql database right now using the dump from today. When that's finished we'll start up the replica (maybe tomorrow morning).

Speaking of tomorrow morning, it's a holiday (Veteran's Day), so I won't be up at the lab (probably just doing the usual "check in from home every few hours and tweak this and that").

- Matt-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude